Variety 3/8/2023

Oscar Week has always been one of our favorite times of year. In addition to feeling like Christmas (or our birthday), it’s when we unveil one of our most cherished traditions: This issue is a time capsule from the past, where we ask a former Oscar winner to pose on our cover with their statuette. Previous participants have included everyone from Barbra Streisand to Whoopi Goldberg to Liza Minnelli. This year, Goldie Hawn invited us into her home — and fished her Oscar from her bedroom closet (where it lives) for another twirl in the spotlight. Actually, Hawn is the only winner we’ve featured on our cover who wasn’t physically present to accept her Oscar. In 1970, when her name was called for best supporting actress for “Cactus Flower,” she…

Variety executive editor of film & media Tatiana Siegel braved L.A.’s snow, hail and floods (really!) to spend an afternoon by a warm fire with film legend Goldie Hawn. Senior awards editor Clayton Davis, who offers his final Oscar predictions, is new to the West Coast. But driving to work through the slush on the 405 has made him believe he’s back in NYC. Executive editor Brent Lang is able to name nearly every major Oscar winner going back six decades from memory. He got to put that trivia to good use writing about the 1970 show. Photographer Peggy Sirota captured Goldie Hawn in Los Angeles on Feb. 24: “I just love Goldie. I’ve worked with her a few times, and she is always incredibly warm, down-to-earth, adorable, lots of fun…

When Jon Favreau stepped onto the red carpet for the Season 3 premiere of “The Mandalorian” on Feb. 28, the Disney+ show’s creator and executive producer was feeling nostalgic. “It’s been a while since we’ve been all together here like this,” Favreau told Variety, evoking the November 2019 premiere for the launch of the show — and of Disney+ itself. “It was before the first episode aired!” At that time, “The Mandalorian” was a scrappy landspeeder in the vast “Star Wars” galaxy, nipping at the heels of “The Rise of Skywalker,” the culminating feature film from director J.J. Abrams that was expected just a month later to obliterate the box office like a cinematic Death Star. Instead, “The Mandalorian” became a global sensation thanks to the incandescent cuteness of Baby…

Mel Brooks came up with the title of his 1981 comedy feature “History of the World, Part I” as a joke. There were never any plans to make a “Part II.” Until now. As the streaming revolution took hold, Brooks, producing partner Kevin Salter and rights holder Searchlight Pictures decided to explore a long overdue sequel, but in series form. They contacted Nick Kroll, who’s known for his sketch comedy (in addition to the painfully funny take on adolescence “Big Mouth”), to kick around a Part II that was four decades not in the making. Kroll brought in Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen to develop the 21st-century spin on the original. But they didn’t want to do a new “History of the World” without the king who started…

Seven years ago, pioneering film and TV producer Debra Martin Chase was thinking about leaving Hollywood. The first Black woman to ink an overall deal at any studio, she’d produced such genre-defining hits as “The Princess Diaries,” “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” While getting projects about women and people of color off the ground was never easy, suddenly prospects were stagnant. “It was at a point where Hollywood just wasn’t interested,” she tells Variety, reflecting on the career crossroads from the living room of her apartment in New York, where she lives while her popular CBS series “The Equalizer” is in production. “You’d talk to people — particularly white men — and their eyes would just glaze over.” As Martin Chase approached 30 years…

AWARDS CIRCUIT Class, close your books and clear your desks. It’s time for your Oscar predictions test. Don’t worry — we have most of the answers for you. We’ve watched all the movies and seen all the precursor ceremonies, which have provided the crucial clues to which films will emerge victorious at the 95th Academy Awards on March 12. A24 and its film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” are forecast to take home the evening’s biggest haul, including best picture and two historic acting Oscars — for Michelle Yeoh (the first Asian and second woman of color to win best actress) and Ke Huy Quan (the second Asian to win supporting actor). Don’t let the projections fool you into thinking those picks are surefire — Quan is the only one…